


[Fandom stats] Early investigations into Wattpad

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [71]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2019-09-16 06:12:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16948518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: Some data and speculations from me, plus some info from Wattpad employees and Vulture.  (As of 2014-2015; I've also donemore recent analyses of Wattpadin 2018.)





	1. Popular fandoms on Wattpad, AO3, and FFN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/82346924278/hello-toasty-firstly-thank-you-for-all-of-the). Sorry about the old, low-res images. Some of the details of how Wattpad search looks/works, etc., have changed since these were originally posted.

mugenmine asked: 

> Hello Toasty! Firstly, thank you for all of the stats and fandom analysis. I am a data fiend so I really appreciate the work that you do :-) I was wondering if you were planning to do fandom analysis on Wattpad? Your AO3/FF stats are extremely interesting and very informative. I was just wondering what the lay of the land looked like over there in Wattpad land. Keep up the awesomeness!

This is a great question!  I hadn’t played around with Wattpad at all, so I spent a while just now poking around.  (I am by no means an expert at this point; please, folks with Wattpad experience, make suggestions or corrections!)

 **Edit:** I screwed up some of the FFN numbers the first time around; now have (I believe) corrected the erroneous data.  But if you spot more numbers that seem out of whack, please let me know!

Wattpad takes all types of fiction, not just fanfic, but for my purposes I just looked at the Fan Fiction category.  It appears that Wattpad is more poorly organized than AO3 or FFN, and there are limited ways to search or sort.  For instance, there isn’t a distinct category for “Sherlock”, but if you search for that word, it will return all works that contain that word (I think? it’s unclear) and give you a breakdown of how many times it occurs in the top 3 categories, as well as popular tags:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMIcOpL8B7NALmoV7KZwTgCqmGY5YEs7HEQBi3_?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

The first thing I was curious about is which fandoms are most common on each of the platforms (see methodology details below).  I chose ~~25~~ 30 fandoms that had a high total number of fanworks across all three platforms, and I looked at the breakdowns:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipOG26WcE_8a1LS9VRmqRntAomzCwAApFHMp_USG?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

(Sorry for the near illegibility — see the raw data below.  Some of these are abbreviations; I used the canonical tag for each on AO3 and FFN.)

Holy crap, there’s a lot of Harry Potter fanfic on FFN.  Also a lot of Naruto and Twilight.  Let’s remove those for now.  We’ll rescale the axes, so we can better see the rest of them:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipOLaGCSDCBxDS-gSgaTIWK8CLHrFfIK6i02RlzJ?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

This is still hard to see; sorry.  Here are the raw numbers — please let me know if you spot errors:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipNpSAnnpE92CZ9z4sJnAlhep41I9xEaWIXMWO4d?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

My main (tentative) takeaways are the following:

  1. The three platforms have largely very different focuses.
  2. AO3 focuses more on TV shows.
  3. FFN focuses more on anime and games.
  4. Wattpad focuses ~~exclusively on One Direction~~ more on boy bands and young male musicians.



Other things I notice about Wattpad: it lets you sort by “Hot”, “New”, “Undiscovered”, and “Completed.”  It doesn’t say what exactly “Hot” signifies, but there are numbers of reads, favorites, and comments listed for each work.

The most popular 1D fic I could find is really fricking popular:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMszowOB0imv0AEXkLZM2Dl3HN-i0zHba37py99?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

….Dude, that’s a lot of reads.  For comparison, on AO3 the top numbers are the following:

  * Hits: [392372](http://archiveofourown.org/works/434904) (0.7% of the reads for the Wattpad 1D fic above)
  * Kudos: [11136](http://archiveofourown.org/works/487739)
  * Comments: [16592](http://archiveofourown.org/works/972937/chapters/1912625)
  * Bookmarks: [4700](http://archiveofourown.org/works/487739)



Thanks for the great question!  I may have gotten a little carried away with it.  :D

——————

Methodology for selecting fandoms: It was a bit handwavy, but…  FFN makes it easy to see the most common fandoms in each genre, so I grabbed the top 5-10 from each genre.  And I already did an analysis a while back of [common fandoms on AO3](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/57933835699/what-are-the-most-common-fandoms-on-ao3-right-now) (which I would do differently now that I understand AO3 tagging better… but still, I used it as a basis to select the top bunch of fandoms from AO3).  With Wattpad, there was no way to sort by fandom size, so I was stuck searching for things that seemed like they might be popular, plus fandoms that were popular on the other platforms.  I’m sure someone more tuned into Wattpad could spot some I’ve missed!  Please do point those out, if you can.  Anyway, I searched for all of those fandoms on each of the platforms, wrote down the totals (just the Fan Fiction total in the case of Wattpad), and then chose the top 30 overall.  Some popular ones may be (probably are) missing.


	2. Response to a Vulture article about Wattpad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vulture wrote an [in-depth look at fanfiction on Wattpad](https://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html). They shared a lot of stats, and I had thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](). All images were screencapped from the [Vulture article](https://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html); I initially debated whether it was okay to share screencaps, but a lot of the images/interactives in the article seem to have broken since the article was originally posted, so this is a way to preserve the data.
> 
> Since I posted this, I learned more (e.g., the number of uploads appears to be referring to individual chapters, not works), and some of the biggest ships and fandoms have changed a lot -- e.g., BTS (K-pop band Bangtan Boys) seems to be the biggest fandom as of Nov 2018.

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipM0z3u0OZhYuDymIGj5-cPscfjudmClz9M56GJI?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

**[Vulture: It's a Fanmade World](http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html) **(featuring lots of **[Wattpad fanfic stats](http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html#stats)**)

NY Mag's latest [issue](http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html) is devoted to fanworks.  At first glance, it seems well-written and does not appear to be of the many "aren't these people freaks?" variety of articles; looking forward to reading it all in more detail soon.  [ _Edit:_ having read it in more detail, I have less positive **[opinions](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/113493774994/if-you-want-to-talk-about-something-weird-lets)**.] But what immediately jumped out at me was the section containing a whole lot of [data about Wattpad](http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html#stats).  Because fandom graphs yay!  But also, more importantly, because Wattpad's numbers have long been the most mysterious and hardest to access of the fanfiction archives I know of. 

Some things that stood out to me (with my stats hat on, not my "curious layperson reading about fanfic" hat on, so I'm admittedly coming at this from a very different place from most of this article's likely audience):

 **Wattpad has 30 million fanfic uploads**. That's an order of magnitude more than AO3 (~1.5M) or FFN (~6M), but I'm also guessing in counts every chapter separately -- and Wattpad works tends toward lots of short chapters, from what I've seen (probably because many people are reading on mobile).  Still, those are some impressive numbers!  But it would be really interesting to know how many words are in each of the big archives, as well as how many unique authors.

 **Most of the stories are coming from the US.**  

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipN4qnf2his6XJIhSP28ZFvkT3sXPNXdgvXc4D6U?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

This is similar to the other big archives -- see the **[fanfic language stats](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/113323520144/toastystats-what-languages-are-ao3-and-ffn)** I just did, which (while not the same thing) reflect a similar bias.  

 **RPF rules Wattpad.** Boy bands are the leading reason (especially 1D), but there are a bunch of other reasons.

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipP3_-Mb48GHgBQOYVMzom0hzQp8-1wOFy3wng-4?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

This confirms what I saw when I did some **[Wattpad fandom stats](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/82350349076/hello-toasty-firstly-thank-you-for-all-of-the)** last year... 1D is much bigger than the other fandoms (though I don't think this set of growing fandoms is comprehensive).  However, I bet 1D is actually shrinking in terms of the proportion of Wattpad that it occupies, because other fandoms seem to be growing faster.

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipOU5A5krOjSxnlRE4-vqaIp9b5TqWyLyYzexTSc?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

(Okay, some of those can't be real ship names, can they?  Mukeclemmings??  Surely not.)  Aside from Supernatural, Frozen, and Fairy Tail, the big ships listed here are RPF.  (I don't know if this is a comprehensive set of the biggest ships, though.)

Given that Sherlock is not one of the big fandoms on Wattpad (which I can anecdotally confirm as a Johnlock author who's cross-posted to Wattpad), it's weird that they then specifically give these stats on Johnlock:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMoz5EG-fwk4sn1SB8WLKPbliFqfh5QH4Q9xdpV?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Okay... what does this number of minutes mean?  How many minutes do the other ships get?  Give me context,  please!  (Also WTF how does having a ton of clocks which are each equal to 50K min help anything??  There is one stat in this figure and the visualization makes it harder to understand, not easier.)

 **Lack of stats outside Wattpad.** There are no comparison stats from other archives -- though at one point, some of my AO3 stats are briefly and obliquely referenced. (I'm guessing it's me -- I don't know anyone else who was studying the ratios of AO3 relationship categories in 2013.)  Most article readers probably don't care, but from a fanfic reader perspective, these platforms are so different -- and what's popular varies so much -- that this feels misleading.  (E.g., if you suddenly feel inspired to start reading Harry Potter fic, you shouldn’t turn to Wattpad.)  

 **Questionable visualizations.** I fully admit this is a data geek gripe.  (And I've certainly been guilty of dubious data viz myself, at times).  But as well as the weird Johnlock graphic above, WTF is with these other silly visualizations that make it harder to understand the data?

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipNDbfyMz1YPRy0yC3_Sy8pOluZLaHwKKbXwEfBS?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Concentric circle lines are weird and hard to read.

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMwzvWFK5YA9PoR8mRYZ1e6sfEhkUz4Mtb5Ld3T?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Why is 20M an endpoint?  This make that figure seem important, but I think it's arbitrary?  I don't think it's implicit in the 63K figure above, but maybe I'm missing something...

And finally,

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMqm0rc6l3vW6dMI8Vqls9B1wlGY_DEY2jFJ43K?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)  
[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMBbWb0wq59p61KUkZJiE72TsRq6Vd6kxIyoNsK?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)  
[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipNZkYHt3lucRzVXzilAnr7EN5djO45Iw_rUni3f?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

At least I understand what's going on in this infographic.   ~~The celebs are being slowly shrunk and pounded into the ground.~~  But having to scroll a bunch to see it all such that you can't directly compare the numbers (and having lots of teeny torso-less women) seems suboptimal.  Ah well.


	3. Demographics and more details

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Demographics and more stats, partly courtesy of a Wattpad employee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/117753986884/toastystats-some-deets-on-wattpad-the-lovely).

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipM_5tXFl5gjXhRgjcC8kgnC4dZfyrKjqWLr3tRG?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipPR4_pSS0ziXH0fA8O5KdXKj8RJwfqUTNSuNAQ7?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

## TOASTYSTATS: SOME DEETS ON WATTPAD

The lovely Emily at [wattpad](http://tmblr.co/mUYW89HstWGCYe381CmlY6g) sent me some numbers about their archive and users!  :)  I made the above graphs to help visualize the data.  I’ll get into the actual stats and how I interpreted them shortly.  But here’s the **TL;DR:** Wattpad may (possibly) rival Fanfiction.net in size.  But if you haven’t heard of it or used it, it might be because you’re not in their primary demographic.

* * *

**Edit: I’ve substantially rewritten the rest of this post to make corrections and clarifications.  Details below the cut.**

**_How/why this post has changed_ **

_You can see the original version[ **here**](http://fandomstats.livejournal.com/5823.html?view=64191) (the only thing missing is the graphs from the top of this post, which were the same in the original) and you can read about why I temporarily removed and then rewrote the rest of this post **[here](http://fandomstats.livejournal.com/5823.html?thread=61631#t61631)**.  Basically, my original demographics comparisons were not well thought out, and also there was also some concern about how I portrayed Wattpad and their motivations.  I was also unhappy that I did not give sufficient context for what “number of users” can means in industry.  So, here’s Take 2!_

* * *

## Background and numbers

I’m not much of a Wattpad user, but I’m curious about it, and I’ve written before about [**what Wattpad is**](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/113408483859/o-wise-and-wonderful-toasty-i-need-help-i-dont)(and what I’ve found it to be like as an author) and about **[Wattpad stats](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/113347880749/vulture-its-a-fanmade-world-featuring-lots-of) **(also **[here](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/82350349076/hello-toasty-firstly-thank-you-for-all-of-the), **and femslash stats [**here**](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/109230389319/searching-for-f-f-fic-on-ffn-and-wattpad)).  In general, I’m neither pro- nor anti-Wattpad; I think it could be good for fandom to have a for-profit company in the mix who’s motivated to figure out how fanfic should work on mobile, but obviously, their motives are less purely about serving fans than AO3/OTW’s. 

I’ve been corresponding with someone from Wattpad (the aforementioned Emily) who is both a fan in some fandoms I follow (hooray -- they’ve hired someone who has a familiar perspective on fandom!), and a fan of my stats since before she took her role at Wattpad.   She shared with me some (publicly available, e.g. [**here**](http://www.wattpad.com/press)) numbers:

> In total Wattpad has:  
>  *** 100 million uploads  
> ** *** 40 million users.  
> ** *** Fanfiction is our biggest category  
>  ***** Approximately 45% are 13-18 year olds  
>  ***** Approximately 40% are 18-30 year olds**

I took the above stats and transformed them into graphs to help me visualize. (That’s what Toasties  _do!_ )  But I had to make some assumptions on the way -- and I’m also aware of some very big caveats when for-profit companies provide these sorts of numbers.  So let’s go through some of those:  


## Who counts as a “user”?

Wattpad, like many companies, has financial incentive to try to appear as large as possible when talking to advertisers, investors, other companies who might acquire them, etc.  So, if they work like most tech companies, they probably aren’t reporting the number of currently active users, or the number of users who’ve posted a story, or anything like that.   **They’re probably reporting something as broad as possible -- like the number of people who’ve ever signed up for an account.**

(I’ve signed up for at least a couple accounts while testing various things -- though most of them are now dormant, I probably count as 2+ users.)  Like I said, most companies do this sort of thing.  For comparison, **Tumblr reports having**  [ **234M blogs**](https://www.tumblr.com/press) (which is not the same as number of users, but most users probably only have one blog, so maybe it’s a good rough guess?) and they are probably similarly counting everyone who’s ever signed up, whether they’ve ever come back to the site or ever posted anything.

## What is an “upload”?

Most Wattpad users upload their stories in parts (chapters).  Probably because **[85% of Wattpad users are on mobile](http://www.wattpad.com/press)**, the story parts are often far shorter than chapters on AO3 or FFN.  I presume that the 100M uploads includes all the chapters people post -- which is far more than the number of stories.  There are also other things authors can upload -- like custom covers for their stories.  I don’t know if those are counted as well.

To estimate number of uploads per work, I took the 30 of the **[most recently updated fanfics](http://www.wattpad.com/stories/fanfiction?view=new)** on Wattpad and recorded how many parts they had.  The average was **14.9 parts per story**.  Which means people upload to the same story around 15 times (at least – they may also upload a new version of an existing chapter). Note: this may be way off from the actual sitewide average; I did not try very hard for an accurate estimate.  

## What does it mean that Wattpad’s biggest category is Fanfiction?

Wattpad is a platform for self-publishing stories of all sorts, not limited to fanfiction.  Here are the categories they offer, according to their “Discover” feature:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipO7vZGStzgIj6EcbdrOMXJ5n2I-_3gEqlGuyG6C?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

This is a kind of a fascinating mishmash of categories you’d find in a bookstore and oddballs.  But that aside, there are 22 categories listed here. I tried to estimate the size of each category (I’ll explain how and show graphs in a separate post), and from what I can tell, Fanfiction has to account for at least 13% of the stories -- but it could also account for far more of the site (30%, 80%... who knows).

Another messy aspect -- some fanfic writers assign their stories to other categories instead.  I just looked through the 15 most recent stories in the Romance section, and at least two of them were fanfic (boy band or YouTuber RPF).  And a glance through 15 recent Vampire works revealed at least two pieces of Vampire Diaries fanfic. However, Wattpad’s numbers are likely based on the category the user selects.

## So how many stories are on Wattpad?

Assuming my parts per story estimate is somewhere in the right ballpark, then the number of stories on the site could be around 100M / 14.9 = 6.7M stories.  


That would be about the same size as FFN, currently!   But keep in mind that I’m massively uncertain about my assumptions, and that this is not just counting the Fanfiction category, but all of Wattpad’s categories.  if, say, Fanfiction accounts for about 50% of the site, that would mean 6.7M * 0.5 = 3.4M stories labeled Fanfiction.

Let’s try to get a sense of how far off I might be:

_**How high might the actual number be?** _

Let’s assume these numbers are as generous as possible (even though I’d be surprised by these):

  * only 5 parts per story uploaded on average  

  * Fanfiction category is 90% of Wattpad



100M uploads / 5 parts per story * 0.90 = **18M fanfics (likely upper bound)**

_**How low might the actual number be?** _

Now lets assume the opposite:

  * 30 parts per story uploaded on average
  * Fanfiction category is 15% of Wattpad (just slightly more than the 13% lower bound I cited above)



100M uploads / 30 parts per story * 0.15 = **500K fanfics (likely lower bound)**  


Okay, so **Wattpad could be smaller than both AO3 and FFN, or it could be larger than both.  But it’s growing fast,** and I wouldn’t be surprised if it rivals FFN soon in terms of total number of stories (of all types), even if it’s not there yet.

## What can we really tell about the demographics?

I’m pretty sure Wattpad got their demographics by asking for date of birth when users sign up -- so they probably actually do have data about the ages that all their users chose to report (assuming that they’ve always asked for that information).  However, remember that thing I said before, about how not all users are active users, and not all users are authors?  That applies to the demographics categories, too.

For instance, imagine the following scenario:  The above pie chart shows the distribution of ages of users who sign up for Wattpad.  But it’s mostly users in the under 18 category who post stories and read/rec stories, so most of the older users drift away and become inactive.  If that were to happen, then far more than 45% of the people using Wattpad to read and write stories would be teens.  

That’s a hypothetical, but it wouldn’t shock me if it’s partly true -- my experience of Wattpad users so far has mostly been that they’re quite young. And people tend to go & to stay where their friends are.

 Nonetheless, even if the above chart is reasonably accurate, **Wattpad users seem to be pretty young.**

There have been some surveys to try to assess AO3 and FFN users’ ages, and I initially tried to draw comparisons to that data.  fffinnagain did a fantastic job pointing out the **[challenges when trying to compare AO3/FFN/Wattpad demographics](http://fandomstats.livejournal.com/5970.html)** based on these data sets.  I would highly recommend that you delve into that post for a thoughtful analysis.  But keeping in mind the limitations of the data, **I’d hazard a guess that users of Wattpad are somewhat younger than FFN users and substantially younger than AO3 users, on average.**

Finally, while the demographics might account for a lot of why nobody I know is using Wattpad much (because I’m way older than most of their users), I’ll also note that the **[fandoms that are biggest on Wattpad are wildly different](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/113347880749/vulture-its-a-fanmade-world-featuring-lots-of)** from those that are the biggest on the other sites.  For many fanfic writers, they’ll go where their fandom is most active.  Right now, that makes Wattpad much better for RPF fandoms than for many others.

* * *

BTW, wattpad is accepting ask box questions, if you’ve got ‘em... I may send some more stats questions.  
  
Thanks again to Emily for the correspondence.  And thanks so much to [fffinnagain](http://tmblr.co/muNvEQ34YsWtav2AFUPbBRg), [notagarroter](http://tmblr.co/mp_2oSIGnM7p8ENkM7XDmJg), and other kind folks who helped contribute to the latest version of this post.  Feedback is always welcome/gratefully accepted! :)


	4. Guesses about size of different genre categories are on Wattpad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/118068784614/wattpad-a-quick-first-stab-at-category-breakdown). For this chapter in particular, it's worth also seeing my [updated Wattpad stats](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16948002).

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipO9Ut2UD8BD5L7XCNsz_lTDAYl8Ig_q6Ox8fIq_?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

## Wattpad: a quick first stab at category breakdown

I recently posted **[new stats about Wattpad](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/118058718424/destinationtoast-toastystats-some-deets-on)** and wondered (not for the first time) about the breakdown of stories across different categories on their site.   The limited Wattpad search functions don’t allow me to measure that directly (unlike on AO3 and FFN). Wattpad has told me that their biggest categories are Fanfiction and Romance, but beyond that, I don’t know anything about their relative sizes. 

But it just occurred to me that I do have some data about the rate with which users post to each category.  Wattpad lets you filter a category approximately by date, and you can view up to 100 pages of search results -- that’s 1500 results.  I decided to look at how long it takes to get 1500 works in each category and use that to estimate sizes of categories.

As a reminder, here are the categories offered by Wattpad:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipO7vZGStzgIj6EcbdrOMXJ5n2I-_3gEqlGuyG6C?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

First I discarded the “Classics” category, which turns out to be mostly empty (probably because it’s advertised as being for works originally published over 100 years ago??).  Then I looked at the earliest date on the 100th page of search results for each category (sorted by date).  ([ **Raw data**](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15z4a54c0ssoxBXPEv_o89il0uiwq9HvlxYFxceJo1Jc/edit?usp=sharing))

(The data I gathered today is probably above average (since fandom is usually especially active on Sunday), but I’m using it as a first guess; I could improve it by sampling over time.)

For four of the categories, the earliest date was today -- meaning that these four categories (Fanfiction, Romance, Teen Fiction, and Random) generated 1500+ new works today alone.  I graphed the estimated rates of works/day above (top of post).

A quick note: from these numbers, it appears that Wattpad users create at least 11K works per day total (not just fanfic).  This may be a substantial over- or underestimate.  But for comparison, I calculate that **[AO3 users currently produce about 2K works per day](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13izg0PF1ts-e76KOLKbccDS5fZ6IFw6ht0CE170awDM/edit?usp=sharing)** averaged over the past month.  Even if the Wattpad numbers are several times larger on Sunday than other days of the week, it looks like Wattpad is growing faster than AO3 if you count all categories.  The Fanfiction category -- if it is actually producing 1500+ posts per day -- may be outpacing AO3 all on its own.

Okay, so, the top four categories above are almost certainly underestimates.  But let’s imagine for a moment that they each product 1500 works/day, and that that’s been pretty typical of the category rates over time.  Then the category breakdown would look like this:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipP8FDP8aJ4DKSWcdjqm5QUCoCmewuoAVrK3C0zX?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Each of the top four categories would comprise 13% of Wattpad.

But we know that Fanfiction is the biggest category, and Romance is the second biggest.  Depending on how much of an underestimate these rates are, the category sizes could vary wildly.  I graphed severa **l[hypothetical but consistent datasets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15z4a54c0ssoxBXPEv_o89il0uiwq9HvlxYFxceJo1Jc/edit#gid=0)** to illustrate what I mean:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMmAOaH0-3rwN7YAFuNzbBgHGEl1DdT6UEu8leE?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipN8mfUqESEoflGTnRFhueIuhYNBl1zXUAUHD1ZG?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMtLBO2hU5BadQnTugSZINmhLNfNMORrYiJknXS?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

So, basically, we really don’t know!  

But at least we have some possible lower bounds on some of the category sizes (again, with a bunch of caveats that my rate data may not be representative, and the rate may have varied a lot over time).

Feedback on methodology & alternate suggestions welcome.  Also tagging [wattpad](http://tmblr.co/mUYW89HstWGCYe381CmlY6g) in case they want to officially chip in. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome, but I’m in the middle of a massive fandom stats backup due to Tumblr purge, so I may be slow to respond.


End file.
